Keeping Death in Mind

The topic came up a little late in the year, being more appropriate for late October/early November - at least at first glance.  However, the winter solstice is not exactly a time to ignore death; pagan religions of old used the time to celebrate the death of the old year (and the old god) and the birth of the new.  The Source was out of town for the meeting, and could not even provide us with some written thoughts, so we were left to our own devices, really.  One way to look at the topic, which was called one of the saddest ever by the Actress before we officially began, is that it is not clinical death or danger that we should have in our thoughts, but mortality.  Our time is limited, as is everyone else's.  Without the idea that we will run out of time for our plans, we have less motivation to complete, or even start them.  Not only that, but because nobody escapes the failure of the body, we will all have to deal with loved ones disappearing from our lives, and pretending that our current, happy, circumstances will last forever does us no favors when that time comes.  Although preparing mentally and emotionally will not prevent sadness or sorrow over the loss, hopefully it will prevent despair or rage.  Another thought occurred to me while others were speaking, which is that we might not even be talking about death, necessarily.  That is, not a "natural" death that appears like magic and whisks people away.  Rather, we should keep the vulnerability of all of us in mind.  Besides observing people die, we can actually make them die, even without meaning to.  It might not even be a direct consequence of our actions, but a result of the things we do and demand; in order to survive, every living thing has needs that must be filled, and resources are simply finite.  To eat, we have to kill animals and plants, not only to consume them, but also to use the land they live on for farming.  We need electricity to maintain our way of life, but power plants pollute and kill all sorts of living things.  If we keep in mind that others are easily damaged, even at risk of death by our actions, hopefully we will be more tolerant, more generous with them.  The idea of death should help us be kinder in life.

Our Doctor, as to be expected, focused first on death as the cessation of life, the physical stopping of bodily function.  Of course, he started by saying that death is just a word, one which has no real significance out of context, making it difficult to approach.  We do not in fact know what death is; we only know the end of life.  He spoke of the difficulties doctors and medical personnel have had in determining the state of life vs. death in patients, saying that even the machines that measure brain activity do not actually show death since breathing or heartbeat might continue.  Drugs can induce a death-like state, but the patient is still not dead.  Although not a psychiatrist, he has had contact with depressed people, who he believes have death in their lives as something almost with a physical presence, either a threat or a solution to their suffering.  Human suffering, however, has nothing to do with death itself.  He later added that everything in the brain might be controlled, and negative thoughts need to be controlled.  Good, positive thoughts and positive actions should be used to balance out the negatives that occur unexpectedly.  He mentioned Seneca's idea that everybody dies when it's time, so we should not care too much about it.  The Actress asked why the big 3 (Abramic) religions were so interested in death and not in life, and our Doctor's opinion is that this idea and the popularity of those religions come from a desire for order and discipline in society.  At the end, he said that we need to have a critical spirit when it comes to things that can be published; the written word is not true just because it is written.  He mused over the use of images of death in religious culture, noting that different sects use it to different effects.  Catholic countries in particular have a certain reverence for death, and Spain has an almost frenzied fascination with it.  He also pointed out that our ideas come from old ideas, things that are not true anymore but have not been discarded yet, hence the need for skepticism and rethinking.  He ended with the advice to learn philosophy, learn not just read, and then destroy it.

The True Philosopher focused on the experience of death, spending his short essay showing how we will not experience our own, but only that of others.  Our own death is so abstract as to be meaningless to us, even if we fear the afterlife, some divinity's judgement, or simply ceasing to exist; it is only the death of a loved one that really has effects for us.  He expressed the typical dichotomy that exists in our minds, in that we cannot only consider death, we also think about life.  Sometimes we want to live only because we do not want to die.  He also emphasized that it is not necessary to be a "philosophical" person to keep death in mind, because it is all around us, and in some areas harder to ignore than others.  He told us that he had been an embedded reporter in the Gaza strip and had seen death up close.  Terrible to see, and stark proof of his own desire to continue living.

The Leader looked at social ideas both in his written thoughts and his first contribution and settled on the idea that we have advanced so far in promoting our own survival that we do not think we have to keep death in mind anymore.  In the past, death was all around and an everyday fact, but today we shove it off to the side and try to ignore it when it happens.  Still, lack of personal experience does not limit our imaginations, and we can imagine what it is like to be dead, especially if we have suffered some kind of lack of consciousness in our lives.  For him, the problem with forgetting about death or actively putting it out of our minds is that this allows us to focus only on the present and forget about the future, when we all know that the future should be planned for.  The question is, how much of our minds should we devote to death?  After listening to the True Philosopher, he admitted he was not convinced about dialectical ideas of life/death, explaining that while our experience of death is that of those close to us dying, our experience of life is only our own.  Also, our actions have more impact on others' lives and deaths than our thoughts ever do, so he echoed my idea that maybe the death we should be considering is the hypothetical result of our hypothetical actions.  The Leader ended by reminding us that we continue to take risks, sometimes stupid ones, even being completely aware that they are risky behaviors, so we must not keep our own death much in mind after all.

An Occasional Participant mused over a number of ideas in his contributions.  He also mentioned the life/death dichotomy in normal thoughts, but also the idea of hiding death away in modern society.  His answer to the Actress' question about religions was that they simply use death as a threat, and events like war or plague are used to their advantage.  He wondered what the role of death will be in the future, as people live longer, but not always better lives.  Will significant numbers of people choose death, rather than being "chosen" by it?  Will euthanasia become something hardly worth mentioning, like minor surgeries?  He also brought up the more metaphorical use of the word death as the idea of being forgotten in the world, but this idea was not much developed in the meeting.  Towards the end, he also reminded us that some funerals, or rituals for accepting a death, become celebrations of life, both the one that has ended and the ones that are possessed still by the mourners.

The Educator said that even if we are not aware of it, we do keep death in mind, at least the possibility of our own death.  We live in a society that prioritizes youth, so even aging can be akin to death in terms of public exposure, especially for women.  We need a balance, however, since constant thinking about the end of our lives should be considered pathological.  She actually mentioned the celebration of life first, although not in the context of the funeral, just as the idea that knowing we are mortal should make us more willing to experience and enjoy all we can of our fleeting existence.